MacArthur, Kim race to the finish line

TOMS RIVER — Ocean County Republican Chairman George Gilmore’s phone buzzed just after 6 p.m. on Monday. Someone from the White House had a question: How is Tom MacArthur going to do tomorrow?

“I said, ‘Well, if Ocean County does its job, and we follow through, we will win,’" Gilmore said, recounting the story at one of the incumbent congressman's last campaign stops in Toms River.

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MacArthur and his Democratic opponent Andy Kim raced across the 3rd Congressional District on Monday, preparing for the national spotlight that will be placed on them on Tuesday. The race will be closely watched as Democrats hope to flip the House from red to blue.

MacArthur told a packed room at a Day’s Inn Hotel that they needed to get their family, friends and neighbors to vote.

“We need every Republican to vote,” MacArthur said. “Not just Republicans, but we need independents who aren’t so sure about the president’s style, but they like the direction. We even need Democrats who feel like their party has left them aside.”

Most recent polls have shown the two candidates virtually tied.

MacArthur, 58, is a millionaire former insurance executive who moved from Randolph in North Jersey to run for Congress in 2014. MacArthur has also been an ally of President Donald Trump. He wrote the amendment that nearly saved the president’s attempt to repeal Obamacare and was the only member of the New Jersey delegation to vote for the tax overhaul that Trump signed with great fanfare.

Kim, 36, has been propped up by anti-Trump anger in the suburbs. He grew up in the district, but has spent most of his adult life in Washington and overseas, where he worked as a civilian national security official in several roles.

The district — which runs from the shore, across the Pinelands and into the Philadelphia suburbs — is split roughly evenly between a heavily Republican and pro-Trump area of Ocean County, and a more Democratic area of Burlington County.

Kim spent the day canvassing, even knocking on the door of his childhood home in Marlton. He said he hopes to “restore civility” to the political discourse.

“I’m drawing my energy from the people here on the ground,” Kim said in a phone interview. “I’m excited about what we’ve built, and now it’s up to the voters.”

Earlier in the afternoon, as first lady Tammy Murphy spoke to volunteers canvassing for Kim, she told them this election cycle was the “most consequential” of her lifetime.

“This is much bigger than just us. This is about moral bankruptcy and whether we can take our country back,” she told the canvassers at a home in Marlton. “We’ve let Pandora out of the box in 2016, we got to stuff it back in there.”